In MSNBC - An Apology to the Graduates, she looks at the world those of us in the generation born to the Baby Boomers have inherited. Although I'm older than most, I'm one of the first of the Boomlet, a Generation Xer who felt lost in the face of choice. The world we have now is, if anything, less innocent than it was when I first started school; but having spent fifteen years in college, I can say that in some ways thing never changed in those intervening years. Some people got rich on the tech boom; it never hit my area. I have now been through a cycle of supposed oeconomic expansion and contraction three times in my adult life; the first when I was about to graduate high school, the second graduating college, the third now, when I was underemployed in my field but at least feeling like things might improve. Somehow, with that, and with the prospect of a 'war on terror' that will drag on for years, uncertainty, and the full expectation of never having Social Security or similar programmes in place when I retire, I for the most part keep some form of optimism. Sure, there's anxiety, and we may also be the generation known for the sheer amount of therapy and anti-anxiety/anti-depressant use...but through it all I learned a valuable lesson, one that I think others in my generation figured out too...success is survival. Success is never letting your dreams die to obstacles. Success is learning to step back your life to a manageable pace, because no amount of money or materialism is worth eroding your health and your interaction with those you love. Success has more to do with the ties you make and the people you touch than anything that comes back on a credit report. True, in our society where all that does matter, we sometimes suffer from being labelled failures because we don't measure up. But in the end, it comes down to what sort of person you become--inside, and on a daily basis--rather than the empty external trappings that seem to fascinate the lowest common denominator in our society.
The press for having the job-the mate-the baby, etc., etc., where you try, like the girls on 'Friends' to plan everything out tends to fall away with two realisations: 1) You can have goals, you can work for success, but you never really have absolute control over the outcome and 2) the important things aren't easily qualified. When you're young and in school, it's grades, it's SAT scores, it's how many teams you were on, how many activities. As you mature, you realise that truly, size doesn't matter--what you do with it does. After college, no one cares if you got a B or A in biology. After a few years in the job market, most people don't even care what your GPA was. What matters is your real-world experience and the lessons you've learnt in life. And even that can get thrown into complete discombobulation with job cuts. Nothing is permanent, except death. Sometimes good things happen to people who really don't deserve it. Sometimes terrible things happen to people who are good. Reality doesn't really always take those things into account. All the little quantifiers of success we as humans create in our society are as artificial as how we keep time. Time happens. So does success. But it isn't always what we label it to be.
And, that, I suspect, is the wisdom of my generation, or at least maybe we come to realise it sooner, since everything in life has sped up, we've just fast forwarded to the moral of the story. A pity it took so much time and effort in all the wrong ways to find out, hmmm? The truly wise, having figured out all that (and thankfully, I had a lot of help from my mentor), also realises that there is still so much in life to be experienced, to learn, that we can't let ourselves burn so brightly to burn out early.
So don't feel too sorry; we'll stick it out. I've been told that youth is wasted on the young. I'm hoping to use those potential extra years to keep my youthful passions going, and I don't know anyone who's ready to give up the ghost quite yet. But thanks for noticing. I think you'll find there are many who are choosing to opt out of the rat race, if they can afford to. Now if only those raising and teaching kids would, and then maybe we could make sure the next generation doesn't burst under the pressure of two generations.
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